E-commerce coupon website Groupon Inc is reportedly mulling a takeover from Google. The Chicago-based company has been in talks about a possible acquisition, according to a Bloomberg report that cited two anonymous sources with “knowledge of the matter.” All Things Digital also reported on Friday that Google might snap up Groupon.

Well, the two big kids on the block have moved beyond calling each other names. Facebook has decided to take Google up on its request to open up or shut up. It seems they will no longer allow folks to find new freinds on Facebook by importing their GMail contacts. This makes it more difficult for GMail users to make connections on Facebook. They have to export their contacts to a file, then upload instead of clicking a button.

The kicker to this story is not the sale of SUSE linux, yet again, but rather the fact that Microsoft is once again involved in the deal. This time, they are buying up $450 million in undisclosed IP assets held by Novell.

Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. is buying Novell for $2.2 billion, the companies announced on November 22. At the same time, Novell announced the “concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash.”

Interesting article shows some slides from a Microsoft presentation about the architecture of Windows Next. The snip below is the assessment they give of Windows 7. Pretty much. Their solution is to serve up a virtual desktop not unlike Chrome OS, with apps stored in the cloud and updated centrally to quickly patch securoity holes and bugs.

With a traditional OS, maintenance burden is on the user or their hired help. The company writes in the presentation, “[Customers today] see application compatibility issues, they see DLL hell, they see an inability to manage efficiently, they see high costs associated with maintenance and upgrades, they see a relatively short lifespan…..This cannot continue. Customers are increasingly refusing to let this continue.”

Google continued its charge into the enterprise sector on Thursday with the introduction of a massive infrastructure overhaul for Google Apps. Previously, Google Apps was limited to basic services like Gmail, Calendar and Docs. Starting today, Google Apps administrators can enable the complete array of Google services, including Google Voice, Reader, Maps and more.

Symantec still has not determined what specific facility or type of facility Stuxnet targeted, but the new information lends weight to speculation that Stuxnet was targeting the Bushehr or Natanz nuclear facilities in Iran as a means to sabotage Iran’s nascent nuclear program.

According to Symantec, Stuxnet targets specific frequency converter drives — power supplies that are used to control the speed of a device, such as a motor. The malware intercepts commands sent to the drives from the Siemens SCADA software, and replaces them with malicious commands to control the speed of a device, varying it wildly, but intermittently.

You apparently get 1 teraflop for $2.10/hour. That’s almost affordable by a grad student for a thesis project. And its only $18.5K/year for continuous operations. Sound like a lot of money? No initial purchase price. No electricty needed. No floor space to rent. No charges for network connectivity. No cooling costs. No system administrator salaries. No service contracts. Nothing to recycle when you’re done.

Jealous of those research facilities with access to high-performance computing via clusters that tap the particular strengths of graphics processing units? No need–Amazon is ready to rent you that kind of muscle by the hour with the addition of a Cluster GPU Instance to its cloud-computing offerings.

For creating our mobile site, we’re going to be primarily harnessing the power of the max-width property. Basically we’re going to tell our website to use different stylesheets depending on the width of the device’s screen. What’s great about this is that the mobile platform (iOS, Android, Windows Mobile) doesn’t matter, since the adjustments are made with screen size only!

Google got all the pronunciations, accents, and business names out of its free 1-800-GOOG-411 service it needed to power its voice recognition, so it’s shutting down today. But please, please don’t ever pay for 411—use these services instead.